ide sweeps of grass, short, thick, and vividly green, as
the velvet moss we sometimes see growing on rocks in New England. Grass
is an art and a science in England--it is an institution. The pains that
are taken in sowing, tending, cutting, clipping, rolling, and otherwise
nursing and coaxing it, being seconded by the misty breath and often
falling tears of the climate, produce results which must be seen to be
appreciated.

So again of trees in England. Trees here are an order of nobility; and
they wear their crowns right kingly. A few years ago, when Miss Sedgwick
was in this country, while admiring some splendid trees in a nobleman's
park, a lady standing by said to her encouragingly, "O, well, I suppose
your trees in America will be grown up after a while!" Since that time
another style of thinking of America has come up, and the remark that I
most generally hear made is, "O, I suppose we cannot think of showing
you any thing in the way of trees, coming as you do from America!"
Throwing out of account, however, the gigantic growth of our western
river bottoms, where I have seen sycamore trunks twenty feet in
diameter--leaving out of account, I say, all this mammoth arboria, these
English parks have trees as fine and as effective, of their kind, as any
of ours; and when I say their trees are an order of nobility, I mean
that they pay a reverence to them such as their magnificence deserves.
Such elms as adorn the streets of New Haven, or overarch the meadows of
Andover, would in England be considered as of a value which no money
could represent; no pains, no expense would be spared to preserve their
life and health; they would never be shot dead by having gas pipes laid
under them, as they have been in some of our New England towns; or
suffered to be devoured by canker worms for want of any amount of money
spent in their defence.

Some of the finest trees in this place are magnificent cedars of
Lebanon, which bring to mind the expression in Psalms, "Excellent as the
cedars." They are the very impersonation of kingly majesty, and are
fitted to grace the old feudal stronghold of Warwick the king maker.
These trees, standing as they do amid magnificent sweeps and undulations
of lawn, throwing out their mighty arms with such majestic breadth and
freedom of outline, are themselves a living, growing, historical epic.
Their seed was brought from Holy Land in the old days of the crusades;
and a hundred legends might be made u